Scrum - info and links for starters

Being a Certified Scrum Master and working with Scrum for over a year, people quite often come to me asking for directions about information on Scrum.
I created this post to keep this information handy for me next time I am asked for this and to share it with the community.

• The Scrum Alliance
  

Is, in their own words, "nonprofit organization committed to delivering articles, resources, courses, and events that will help Scrum users be successful". It was founded by Ken Schwaber, Mike Cohn and Esther Derby some of the founders of Scrum itself. There is one specific article which points the user to important fundamentals of Scrum like sprints and user stories. The Glossary of Terms of Scrum is very useful tool for anyone browsing through Scum information through the web or books.

• Control Chaos

Is "the home of the Certified ScrumMasters organization, offering training, gatherings, information, and materials regarding Scrum, including frequent articles". Amongst their resources you can find this brief overview of Scrum and

• Videos

This video (with legend) from Ken Schwaber is also a great introductory resource. It is a speech given by him at Google.

• Books

In general, all the books by Ken Schwaber regarding Scrum are great (if not the best) references for understanding and starting the use of Scrum in your company. I would begin with "Agile Project Management With Scrum" and then, after having the basics in your mind read "The Enterprise and Scrum".

Have fun!

Certified Scrum Master

Today I became, as the subject of the post suggests, a Certified Scrum Master. As stated in the Scrum Alliance web-site, "Scrum is an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work".
Just finished the training with Ken Schwaber (in the picture with me) and I've posted below some notes I took during the training.

1. Scrum is not intended to solve your company's development problems. Actually, if you have enough problems, Scrum is most likely to expose them even more.
2. Scrum is a framework that was built to give the team a tool to organize, measure and estimate their work and the state of the product.
3. Scrum by itself will not increase quality or make you deliver faster code. Check item number 1.
4. Think about people and not resources. The teams are made of people.
5. Transparency is the keyword. Scrum gives to the product owner transparency over your project, showing exactly where you are and how much you still need to finish it.

The training was great, and all the time you could see people saying: "ahhhh, so that's how it is done"...
As I observed today, lots of people believe that Scrum might be the solution for their problems and are actually trying it at their companies. However, listening to the most experienced on it is fundamental, and as Ken suggested at the end of the training: talk to each other.
Finding out what other teams are trying, what is working and what is not is the key to success.